1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a file deletion method and apparatus for deleting a music file recorded in recording media such as a memory card, a computer program for performing the method, and a camera with audio reproduction function.
2. Description of the Related Art
An image captured with a digital camera is recorded in the recording media, including a flash memory card such as smart media or compact flash, or a small hard disk card called a micro-drive. The capacity of recording media has increased year after year, making it possible to record the image data as well as digital music data.
Further, some audio compression techniques such as MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer-III), TwinVQ (Transform-Domain Weighted Interleave Vector Quantization) and WMA (Windows Median Audio) have enabled the long time recording for a lot of music. In the digital cameras, if an audio decode and encode circuit is contained, a function as a music player can be added. In recent years, a digital camera with MP3 audio reproduction function has been developed and put on the market.
In case of deleting a file within the recording media using a digital camera with the additional function as the music player, the image data can be confirmed on a liquid crystal display (LCD) screen of a display unit, but the music file has a drawback that a file name can not be displayed for confirmation unless its font is used in the digital camera.
Also, there is the possibility that the recording media may contain the image data and the music data together, but the music file has a considerably large data size, corresponding to the data amount as much as a plurality of sheets of image data, whereby the recording medium for recording the music file becomes a capacity full state (no remaining recordable capacity) immediately after image-capturing begins, bringing about the danger that the image-capturing function of camera itself may be impeded.